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Does the Dog Know What Its Nose Knows?

On October 31, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in two Florida cases involving the reliability and proper use of drug- sniffing dogs. Florida v. Jardines, No. 11-569, looks at whether using a trained detector dog to sample odors emanating from inside a home violates the 4th Amendment prohibition against unreasonable searches.

Florida v. Harris, No. 11-817, directly challenges the accuracy of Aldo, a police dog who seems to have imagined the presence of chemicals for manufacturing methamphetamines in a pick-up truck. Absent proof of training and certification, by what measure is Aldo qualified for detection work, and if he is not qualified, how can any evidence he produces be acceptable in court, the defense asks?

If the Court follows its precedents and accepts the demonstrably false claim that dogs are biological machines virtually infallible in their ability to detect the presence of an odor they have been trained to recognize, it will have done no more than deepen the gulf between reality and the law.

But a ruling recognizing that, despite their great promise, many detection dogs are poorly trained using flawed and inconsistent measures of proficiency and improperly handled could conceivably force creation of national standards for training, certifying, and deploying detection dogs. It also might encourage some jurisdictions with inadequate programs to retool or quit the detection- dog business.

Dogs have wonderful noses. Rats, ferrets, and pigs—at least where truffles are concerned—do too. But dogs are more socially acceptable and so they get most of the detection work. There is a lot of it. Detection dogs—they are also called “scent dogs,” “sniffer dogs,” and “detector dogs”—are in demand everywhere and employed to detect not only the old standbys (drugs, guns, explosives, and bodies), but also underground gas and water leaks, termites, agricultural pests, counterfeit money, and residue from chemicals that arsonists use to start fires. Some studies have indicated that dogs can also detect several types of cancer.

But the training and certification of detection dogs is balkanized and inconsistent. Problems with their accuracy and consistency in performing, especially for dogs involved in the corrosive war on drugs, are well known but ignored or rationalized away.

I wrote about some of these problems In Dog’s Best Friend (1997) and in the December 24, 2002New York Times (a subscription might be required).. Newer reports have suggested that drug detection might not be proper work for a dog without major reform.

A dog is trained to search luggage at the Customs and Border Patrol Canine Enforcement Training Center.

In the estimation of many people who work with them, a well trained dog and handler team can find its target 100 percent of the time in training with no misses and no false alerts. But a poorly trained dog and less than competent handler may score worse than chance, especially when false alerts are treated for scoring use to score false alerts as misses argue that the dog has detected something that could be very faint residue of the contraband being sought. More likely, the dog is making a substitution or taking a short cut or focusing on the wrong substance or responding to unconscious cues from its handler.

It is well known that the handler’s emotional state and expectations are transmitted to the dog through the leash that joins them. Everything from the dog’s health to the conditions in which it is working also affect its performance.. Some years ago, a police drug-sniffing dog in Alabama was found to be alerting to plastic baggies of the sort used in its training—no matter whether they held marijuana or turkey. In another case, a bomb dog took a liking for duct tape and began to alert every time it encountered a piece. The dog was taken from service and retrained. In another case, medical students from the Middle East were wrongly detained after a police bomb-detection dog falsely alerted to the presence of explosive-making material in their car.

Judging from the few studies that have been done, when false alerts are counted as errors, drug-detection dogs’ accuracy can fall below 20 percent in real world settings, not the training facility. The problem is that errors are not value neutral: they affect people’s lives and livelihoods. No matter what the Supreme Court rules this time, these questions of accuracy and reliability must be addressed if detection dogs are not to see their credibility steadily eroded. National standards for training and certification should be implemented to avoid that.

In addition, considerably more research is needed into what a dog’s nose knows and the best ways to put that knowledge to work helping people.

....And, well, sometimes dogs LIE! And I am not talking about lying DOWN, but the perversion of truth! Not that they do it very often, and not that dogs don't tend to be VASTLY more trustable than humans, but they do do it(as well as just plain doo-doo) SOMETIMES. I personally knew an attention-starved Dobermann that, as all dogs did where he lived, got sandspurs stuck in his feet. The humans in his life, that mostly ignored this dog, could be motivated to investigate, remove a sticker, and give him an affectionate pat when he was seen limping. The dog began FAKING LIMPS to get attention--I saw it happen repeatedley, and was duped myself numerous times when visiting in the area. You'd check his paws--nothing, and he'd go galloping off happily sans limp after a bit of attention! Now, imagine a very bored sniffer dog--nothing going down for HOURS(or DAYS!). Enjoying immensely(as they most certainly do!) all the excitement and action that goes on when they make a "find"; I can just see one "pretending" every once in awhile just for fun's sake, as dogs most certainly "pretend" in other play contexts. I don't think that is far-fetched(ahem!) at all!

I would agree that dogs sometimes lie. I had a German shorthaired pointer who would gobble down his food then race to the front door and start barking as if someone were there. When my Chesapeake Bay retriever left his food to investigate, the pointer would race back to the kitchen and chow down.

But regarding the Doberman, is not an alternative explanation that he had learned he would get attention by limping up to someone and presenting his paw for inspection whether there was anything in it or not? He performed in a certain way and was rewarded with attention.

The Doberman didn't limp up to people--he would just start limping in the vicinity of people, and then allow them to examine his foot--he never actually presented his foot like when "shaking hands". Still, I suppose, that could be considered performing a specific action/behaviour for a reward, without fully connecting WHY people were responding to it--even so, still purty clever! And effective! I had a dog that "Lie-barked" too, but for different motivation. I had an Azawakh, a Saharan breed of sighthound that does not take the cold very well. This dog's preferred sleeping spot was on the end of a couch next to my wood heater(only source of heat in the house in the Winter). If any other dog(of which there were many!) got "HIS" place, he would rush furiously barking at the door, arousing the whole household(including me before I caught on!), and then calmly took his spot as soon as it was vacated! This tactic never failed to work for him!